Middle Eastern Rant, excised from current novel

   

      If only, Zoe thought, if only there was some brand-new ... thing that might start a mad trend for peace all over the Middle East -- something underwritten, anarchic, erupting from, say, the women; the mothers, the wives, the daughters, the sisters, who could not help but weep in sympathy and fear when another mother's young son strapped on the bomb-pack and set bravely forth, believing in Allah more than in that first, sweet, sweet kiss – God they got younger and younger, didn't they?  From their youngest twenties down -- once to a nine-year-old boy entrusted (entrusted!) with that enormous backpack.

     (Just get on the bus, Hakim, and pull the string.  Make sure the driver is driving, and don't make anybody look at you, no matter what...)

      And all the while the news got worse and worse.  She'd once met and couldn't stand a troop of Israeli soldiers with puffed-up chests talking about how they'd bombed a village near the ever-talling Wall ('women and children?  They looked at each other, a gleam in their eye, their faces absolutely solemn.  'Almost certainly not.'  The wink inherent; grotesque).

     She'd also met others, much too young to be haunted but haunted they were, their eyes hollow and flat, their voices raspy, saying they could not stand this man's army.  They wanted either to bury their guns or shoot their heads off.  

     They sat in cafes and drank from flasks all night long, speaking ever-more broken English but with such liquid eyes it was all understood, the mayhem and the cruelty, the orders of shoot-to-kill, even children, small boys of six, and girls, younger, imitating their brothers, shouting in their fragile little girl voices, a chant made up on the spot:  hey, hey, go away, don't come back another day!

     These were the young men who stumbled home crying, weeping, for the things they had seen; and the things they had done.  To children!  Just children, throwing stones.

     But it seemed everybody knew the secret that was no secret:  nobody wanted peace.   Everybody wanted just to win, when winning was in fact losing.  When winning would destroy half, if not all, of the land, and the crops would wither and die, the Dead Sea swell with the deader, until you could not wade into it without immediately being swung into the dead-man float.  Drifting on the surface, held high, high up from everything below – how much blood, how many bodies.  The sea was slick with it, the salt a salve that tore at your wounds, the sun a blister you got for being beneath it.

     Everything, this is how it seemed to Zoe some smoky, grey mornings, was going to get so much horribly worse before it got better.  And it seemed as if no single individual had more than zero to the nth power to change it/anything – because who was actually in charge?  The politicians, who had so-called been 'elected' by the people?  All the subversives working beneath, or the angels above (or maybe it was just the Kardashians, ruling the world?  Because what really matters?  Well, duh, if her ass is real or not!)

     Hey look to America for the freshest hypocrisy – organic!  Seasonal!  Homegrown!  The land of equality?  Yeah, tell it to the 99 (that includes way too many of my friends, she thought, and soon enough --) percent. Because what did a penny buy you these days?  Just a rubbed-out semi-likeness of Lincoln's profile.  C'est tout.